Icebergs could float to the rescue of Cape Town water crisis

In case you didn’t know, Cape Town, South Africa, one of the world’s great and most beautiful (I am told) cities has run out of water. The tap has almost run dry. So, the city is looking at alternatives and due south there is a lot of fresh water in ice form. Just watch out for the penguins.

(From Reuters)

Salvage master Nick Sloane told Reuters he was looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of liters of drinking water.

“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet,” said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014…

…Cape Town-based Sloane said his team could wrap passing icebergs in fabric skirts to protect them and reduce evaporation. Large tankers could then guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.